Visit the International Space Station via Google Street View

Google has made a small step into outer space with the help of an astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS). In a blog post, astronaut Thomas Pesquet announced today that Google Street View for the ISS is now available. In fact, he has spent six months aboard the ISS as a flight engineer and his latest mission consisted of recording Street View imagery of every crook and cranny of the 15 connected modules of the ISS “to show what the ISS looks like from the inside, and share what it’s like to look down on Earth from outer space.”

Imagine that! You don’t have to fear anynmore about getting lost on the ISS should you, by any chance, end up there. Perhaps as a tourist? Or, those who have been accepted as future astronauts could load up the app now and start scoping out the crew quarter and reserving their sleeping bunks.

Where will Google Street View go next? Will the next rover that NASA is sending to Mars have a Street View camera mounted on top? Or, better still, perhaps the next Mars probe will sport a Street View camera to record the voyage itself so astronauts on a future manned mission to the Red Planet might know what to expect along the way. And, mission accomplished, they might say, “OK, Google,” take us Home [in a really fast spaceship].

Did You Know? On this day in 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module onto the moon soil. At the bottom of the ladder, Armstrong then spoke the famous words, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”